Brent Ozar tells us how the DBA's job has evolved

[MUSIC PLAYING] You know, 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago, it was people who accidentally got into database administration. They were just kind of standing near the SQL Server and they had to fix it when it broke, but it wasn't a discipline. We didn't go to classes for it. It was just things that you accidentally learned and had to go Google eventually. Over time, people tried to treat it more like a science. You know, when I click here, this should happen. But it was never very formalized. As a result, you see a lot of old blog posts, articles with bad documentation out there. So being a DBA over the last several years, even, has been really confusing. As people have to go Google for things, they find the wrong answers, they do it wrong. Things get worse instead of better, or they get better and they don't understand why. Over time, the role has started to change a little. You can't really point your finger to just data science or to cite reliability engineering, but people are trying to treat it more of an engineering discipline now, as more that's not necessarily a college course, because you're not going to go to college and get a degree to be a database administrator, but trying to treat it more of as a profession where we're going to have written policies and procedures. These are things that I know will be successful, these are things that I can pass on to my junior DBA so that he or she doesn't have to learn the same lessons I did and have the scar marks all over him to prove it. [MUSIC PLAYING]